Decapolis is a book which imagines the city otherwise. Bringing together ten writers from across Europe, it offers snapshots of their native cities, freezing for a moment the characters and complexities that define them. Ten cities: diverse, incompatible, contradictory – in everything from language to landscape. In Amsterdam every Friday night, a lonely woman cooks for her men – a circle of middle-aged bachelors. In Barcelona, a self-regarding poet tries to capture the essence of the city in an eleven-word lyric. In Reykjavik, an unemployed journalist wanders through the deserted buildings of the newspaper he once wrote for. In all cases, these are cities in states of transition: Zagreb in the shadow of the Balkan conflict; Manchester on the cusp of social and economic change; Berlin with half its industrial buildings abandoned like the Mary Celeste. The ultimate ‘untranslatability’ of these cities’ experiences is never in question, and yet through these fractured, isolated glimpses – chance encounters, snatches of conversation, local TV bulletins – something quite unlikely begins to emerge: a commonality grounded in the fleeting and the momentary, a continuum, perhaps, of urban experience.
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